Building Saddam Hussein's Bomb

By Gary Milhollin;

Published: March 8, 1992

"About this big." high in the United Nations building in New York, a U.N. official is holding his arms out in a circle, like a man gripping a beach ball. "About a yard across, weighing about a ton."

This is the Iraqi bomb -- slightly smaller than the one dropped on Hiroshima, but nearly twice as powerful -- packing an explosive force of at least 20,000 tons of TNT. The official is dramatizing a drawing he has made in his notebook, based on documents seized in Iraq. He is sure that the bomb, if built to the specifications in the drawing, will work.

At the bomb's center is an explosive ball of weapon-grade uranium. Around this is a layer of natural uranium to boost the yield and a second layer of hardened iron to keep the core from blowing apart prematurely. If the bomb is to detonate properly, these parts must have just the right dimensions, and there must be a firing circuit accurate to billionths of a second. Documents in the United Nations' possession show that the Iraqis have all the right dimensions and the necessary firing circuit.

This is the bomb that, according to U.N. estimates, Saddam Hussein was 18 to 24 months from building when the gulf war started. It is the bomb he is still likely to build, despite the war and the most intrusive nuclear inspections in history, unless the United Nations changes its tactics.

"They are pouring concrete as we speak," says a U.N. official at the next desk. Saddam, he says, is rebuilding the bombed nuclear sites in plain view of U.N. inspectors. "He is even planting trees and re-landscaping," he adds, "to boost employee morale." Another U.N. official has a similar story. During a visit to the Iraqi nuclear weapon testing site at Al Atheer, he says, his Iraqi hosts looked him in the eye and said, "We are waiting for you to leave."

Since the inspections started last spring, the Iraqi disinformation specialists who serve as guides have done their best to outfox the inspectors. In one instance, the Iraqis hid reactor fuel by loading it on the back of a truck and driving it around the reactor site, always staying about 200 yards in front of the inspection team. The fuel contained weapon-grade material.

Perhaps the most notorious confrontation occurred when inspectors followed an intelligence tip to a cache of sensitive documents. In an attempt to elude the Iraqis, each of the 44 team members hid a stack of papers inside his clothing. Rather than strip-search the inspectors before video cameras, the Iraqis simply forbade them to leave, leading to a four-day standoff in a Baghdad parking lot under a scorching summer sun. Only after a unanimous vote of support by the Security Council did Iraq finally relent.

That spirited encounter is now as much a part of history as the brief triumph of the 100-hour war. Under the cease-fire terms, inspectors for a U.N. Special Commission were charged with the "destruction, removal or rendering harmless" of Iraq's nuclear weapon potential. But after months of chasing increasingly fruitless intelligence leads, morale on the Special Commission is scraping rock bottom.

The Iraqis know it, too. "They've started laughing at us," one U.N. official says, adding that the Iraqis have even threatened individual inspectors. "They have basically told our people that they know where we live," he says in exasperation.

The problem is that the inspectors have exhausted their information. The first inspections were fueled by leads from Iraqi defectors and the chance discovery of the sensitive documents in Baghdad. But that luck has run out just as the Iraqis have organized their resistance to the inspections. Recently, in fact, they told the inspectors that "you won't find any more documents in this country."

That remark came after a U.N. team had charged into several suspected reactor sites, following intelligence leads that turned out to be duds. "All we found were empty warehouses, cement factories making real cement and prisons with real prisoners," one inspector says. The inspectors believe they have reached a dead end.

The inspectors' defeat raises a chilling prospect: In the absence of a major new U.N. effort, Saddam Hussein is still likely to get the bomb. Thus, Iraq has become a test case for nuclear proliferation. If war and a full-court press by the United Nations cannot stop an outlaw nation like Iraq from making the bomb, what will it take to stop countries like Iran, North Korea and Libya?

In a sense, what is being played out in Iraq is the first battle of a new cold war, fought with spies, international pressure and export controls. The West may have won the first cold war against the Soviet Union, but it is losing the second to Iraq and other nations that want to get the bomb.

SADDAM HAS HAULED HIMSELF UP THE nuclear mountain on a chain of high-tech exports, sold by the very Western countries whose inspectors -- now on loan to the United Nations -- are trying to find them. Other similarly favored nations could easily follow Saddam's example, given existing export laws. Iran and Libya are now maneuvering into this position.